I seem to be going through a 109 frenzy at the moment - not really sure why. I should be finishing off my stock 1/48 Tamiya 109E-3 in French markings, but Werner's Wings' great V-13/V-14 conversion set arrived in the mail a couple of weeks ago, and starting on it proved irresistable. I picked up another Tamiya 109E-3 kit and started cutting...
The decal sheet is particularly good looking.
I'd originally planned to do Udet's wine-red V-14, but the more I thought about it, the more I was drawn to the V-13 in its late 1937 world land speed record-setting configuration, with its unique racing canopy and spinner, puttied seams, and highly polished finish. Here's one of the very few photos of this machine that I have been able to find.
And here's the cleaned-up racing spinner (on the left - the other one in cream resin is the V-14 spinner).
The make or break element of the V-13 conversion is the racing canopy. Werner's wings supplies this as a very nice vac form - but you only get one copy, so have to be very careful when cutting it out. This photo is a few days old - I've now successfully removed the canopy from its base, and found it fits the Tamiya kit perfectly.
One thing I did manage to do when cleaning up the canopy, however, was add a couple of sandpaper scratches (these aren't the scratches you can see in the photo - they are on the cutting tile underneath the canopy). Can anyone suggest the best thing to use for sanding these out?
I've also started fiddling with the cockpit. Tamiya's cockpit is pretty basic, so I'll be adding a little more detail, because even though I'm modelling the plane with a closed canopy, the vac canopy is very clear, and lots can be seen through it.
Here's where the guesswork starts. As I said, there aren't many photos of the V-13 around, and so far as I know, none of the V-13/V-14 cockpits. While the V-13 and V-14 look fairly similar to a 109E (they were amongst the first Daimler-Benz - as opposed to Jumo - powered machines), the airframes themselves were sourced from fairly early in the 109B production run. So it's reasonable to assume that - rear of the engine firewall - the airframes were more-or-less stock 109Bs, including the cockpits. This is what I'm planning on running with at the moment - please let me know if I've got it horribly wrong!
What does this mean in terms of the kit cockpit? Only a couple of things. I'm going to sand off the kit sidewall detail and use the spare resin sidewalls from Classic Airframes Bf 109A kit. I'm also going to use a spare CA spade-type control column, and add a couple of additional details (including a first aid stencil) to the parcel shelf behind the pilot's seat. The seat itself will be an Ultracast item.
Moving on to the wings, I've started to remove the underwing cannon bulges, after first adding the resin plugs supplied in the conversion kit. These fit well, and work even better, providing important additional structural strength as I cut through the cannon bulges with a razor saw. I just need to do a final bit of tidying up here, and this will be done.
Now to my major dilemma with this conversion. While the replacement resin forward fuselage/engine is beautifully mastered and nicely cast, it seems to have shrunk a little after being removed from the moulds. Not much, but enough to throw everything out by between 2-4 mm in all directions.
While the shrinkage is a bit hard to see from these photos (I've included a top-down comparison of the resin nose with that of my stock Tamiya 109E), it's going to be a bugger to fix. So far I've had two ideas for fixing it:
1. scoop out as much of the solid resin core as I can, then add sprue spacers and shim out the diameter to match the kit parts; or
2. slice the whole piece in half vertically with a razor saw, add some plastic card to expand the width, then glue it together again.
And this will only fix the width problem - I'm still going to have to make a 2-4 mm extension plug to correct the length (I didn't notice the shrinkage until I'd cut back the kit nose to the recommended panel lines - of course...).
That said, none of this is impossible, and fixing the problem will be a useful extension of my modelling skills. (It may also improve my vocabulary.) If anyone has any other ideas on fixing the problem - or any other comments at all - please pass them on!
cheers Brad
